Nature, Culture and the Sacred

with special guest Nina Simons

In this episode, Tenzin speaks to Nina Simons, co-founder of Bioneers and author of Nature, Culture and the Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership.

Nina Simons is the co-founder and Chief Relationship Officer at Bioneers, and leads its Everywoman’s Leadership program. Bioneers is a nonprofit that uses media, convening, and connecting to lift up visionary and practical solutions for many of our most pressing social and ecological challenges, revealing aregenerative and equitable future that’s within our reach today. Nina is a social entrepreneur who is passionate about reinventing leadership, restoring the feminine, andco-creating a healthy, peaceful,and equitable world for all. She speaks and teaches internationally at schools, conferences, and festivals, and co-facilitates transformative workshops and retreats for women that share practices for regenerative leadership through reclaiming wholeness and relational mindfulness.

Her book Nature, Culture and the Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership offers inspiration for anyone who aspires to grow into or inhabit their own unique form of leadership with resilience and joy. The book draws on Simons’ own personal learning and extensive experience with women’s leadership development... to reconnect and defend people, nature and the land, both practically and spiritually.

Learn more about Bioneers, or read more about Nina's books.

Gratitude's Gifts

In this episode, Tenzin explores the many gifts that gratitude can bring to our lives, helping to offset our natural negativity bias and bring more richness to our experiences and our relationships. She then shares some simple ideas on how we can cultivate our own practice of gratitude with an experiential meditation.

Luminous Darkness Part 2

featuring Deborah Eden Tull

In this episode, Tenzin continued her conversation with Zen meditation teacher, author, activist and sustainability educator Deborah Eden Tull, continuing a rich conversation about her new book, Luminous Darkness: An Engaged Buddhist Approach to Embracing the Unknown.

Darkness is deeply misunderstood in today’s world; yet it offers powerful medicine, serenity, strength, healing, and regeneration. All insight, vision, creativity, and revelation arise from darkness. It is through learning to stay present and meet the dark with curiosity rather than judgment that we connect to an unwavering light within. Welcoming darkness with curiosity, rather than fear or judgment, enables us to access our innate capacity for compassion and collective healing.

Tull shows us how the labeling of darkness as “negative” becomes a collective excuse to justify avoiding everything that makes us uncomfortable: racism, spiritual bypass, environmental destruction. We can only find the radical path to wholeness by learning to embrace the interplay of both darkness and light.

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Luminous Darkness: An Engaged Buddhist Approach to Embracing the Unknown by Deborah Eden Tull is a resonant call to explore the darkness in life, in nature, and in consciousness—including difficult emotions like uncertainty, grief, fear, and xenophobia—through teachings, embodied meditations, and mindful inquiry that provide us with a powerful path to healing.

Darkness is deeply misunderstood in today’s world; yet it offers powerful medicine, serenity, strength, healing, and regeneration. All insight, vision, creativity, and revelation arise from darkness. It is through learning to stay present and meet the dark with curiosity rather than judgment that we connect to an unwavering light within. Welcoming darkness with curiosity, rather than fear or judgment, enables us to access our innate capacity for compassion and collective healing.

Dharma teacher, shamanic practitioner, and deep ecologist Deborah Eden Tull addresses the spiritual, ecological, psychological, and interpersonal ramifications of our bias towards light.

Tull explores the medicine of darkness for personal and collective healing, through topics such as:

• Befriending the Night: The Radiant Teachings of Darkness

• Honoring Our Pain for Our World

• Seeing in the Dark: The Quiet Power of Receptivity

• Dreams, Possibility, and Moral Imagination

• Releasing Fear—Embracing Emergence

Tull shows us how the labeling of darkness as “negative” becomes a collective excuse to justify avoiding everything that makes us uncomfortable: racism, spiritual bypass, environmental destruction. We can only find the radical path to wholeness by learning to embrace the interplayof both darkness and light.

About the Author

Zen meditation and mindfulness teacher, author, activist, and sustainability educator. Eden teaches the integration of compassionate awareness into every aspect of our lives. She spent seven years training as a Buddhist monk at a silent Zen monastery and has been teaching dharma for 19 years. Eden has also been living in, and teaching about, sustainable communities for over 25 years.

Her teaching style is grounded in compassionate awareness, experiential learning, inquiry, and an unwavering commitment to personal transformation. She teaches engaged awareness practice, which emphasizes the connection between personal awakening and global engagement. Eden draws upon teachings from the natural world and an embodied understanding of animism.

She is author of “Relational Mindfulness: A Handbook for Deepening Our Connection with Our Self, Each Other, and Our Planet” (Wisdom 2018) and “The Natural Kitchen: Your Guide for the Sustainable Food Revolution.” Her work has been featured in The Los Angeles Times, Tricycle, Yogi Times, GOOP, Shambhala Times, and The Ecologist. She also teaches The Work That Reconnects, a program created by Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy, and teaches for UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center. Eden offers retreats, online courses, and consultations internationally.

Readers can connect with Deborah Eden Tull on Facebook, Instagram, and Goodreads.

To learn more, go to DeborahEdenTull.com.